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Children’s Oncology Group
The Children's Oncology Group
As there are many forms of childhood cancer, no single hospital sees enough patients with a particular form of cancer to allow effective research. The answer to this problem is to pool resources and data, allowing larger, multi-organizational studies that might share the results.
In 1956, a group of experts in a number of hospitals in the United States did just that, sharing their expertise and ideas, patient populations and results in treating children with leukemia, the most common form of childhood cancer.
This consortium was North America's first co-operative research group, a model that has since become the standard for medical research of all kinds.
Now known as the Children's Oncology Group or COG, the alliance consists of thousands of doctors, nurses and other experts who treat children with cancer, as well as scientists who discover new treatments in the laboratory. The group is made up of more than 200 top medical institutions across the United States and other countries, including Canada. Canada's COG member institutions also have membership on the C17 Council.
The Childhood Cancer Foundation Candlelighters Canada is a proud supporter of COG activities in Canada, working through CCPHOD to provide funding to ensure that as many Canadian children as possible have ready access to the cutting edge therapies often available only through COG-based clinical trials.
Each COG institution has a multidisciplinary team of physicians, nurses, basic scientists and other specialists with the skills needed for state-of-the-art diagnosis, treatment, care and investigation of childhood cancer.
COG conducts over 150 concurrent studies covering all the principal cancers of infants, children and adolescents. Over 40,000 patients are being treated according to COG research protocols. These clinical trials compare the best available treatment to one or more experimental treatments, which are carefully developed with the goal of yielding even better results.
When a child is treated on a COG protocol, all the information about the patient's diagnosis, treatment and results is sent to the Group Operations Center. There all the data are collected and analyzed, and findings are published for the entire membership.
In addition to these data, tissue samples and cell lines may be collected and stored for the use of group members in current and future research. The Group also maintains laboratories essential to the diagnosis, treatment and research of childhood cancers.
Research findings are shared with the entire membership through ongoing communication, publications and meetings. The Group then builds on this knowledge to determine the next steps for research.
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